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Gilles Deleuze
Brief Biography '''Gilles Deleuze''': Born in Paris to a middle-class family, Deleuze was educated and taught philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes from 1969 until his retirement in 1987. At the time of the 1968 student workers revolts in France, Deleuze began to write books in his "own" voice, aiming to replace official philosophy with what he called "bastard" philosophy. Deleuze developed a new philosophy of becoming and exteriority-- joining an orphan line of metaphysical thinkers that includes Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Gottfried Leibnez, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson-- that his work combines the various other strands of contemporary theory. '''Felix Guattari''': Born in the Paris suburb of Colombes, he received an erratic education; never having earned any official degrees, he had worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, a psychiatric hospital outside Paris known for innovative practices in group therapy. One of Jacques Lacan's earliest trainees, Guattari quickly took leave of the master. Lacan, he felt, had transformed structural psychoanalysis into a religion devoted to cultivating a initiating followers. Guattari's anithierarchical and anarchic tendencies drew him into an alliance with Deleuze. Together they wrote the polemical ''Anti-Oedipus.'' Historical Context Key Words * Rhizome - a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that pulls out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals * Plateau-in the middle, never in the end or in the beginning * minoritarian- is a neologism for a political structure or process in which a minority segment of the population has a certain degree of primacy in that entity's decision making. * assemblage- a collection or gathering of things and people. A machine or object made of pieces fitting together. * nomadism- * bianry logic - the logic of either/or, in which all values comes in pairs of opposition. Key Quotes * "The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass" (1458). * "Thought lags behind nature" (1456). * "For science would go completely mad if left to its own devices" (1461). * "Joyce's words, accurately described as having "multiple roots," shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dualism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject" (1457). Analysis Deleuze and Guattari utilize a rhizome as a sort of metaphor to describe the multiplicities of human beings and to describe a position that comes from the middle rather than the tops or bottoms. The plateau serves as ground to emphasis neither the extremes of the one or of the multiple and serves a place of convergence. Like the rhizomes, human beings are an assemblage of lines that intersect and converge into a multiplicity of connections. Deleuze and Guattari suggest a way of movement that relies neither on the past or a beginning, but rather proceeds and picks up speed from the middle as it "sweeps one and the other way, a stream without a beginning" (1462 NATC). Related Texts Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. ''Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. ''Translated by Robert Hurley, et al., Viking Penguin, 1977. Major Criticism Both this work and the author's prior work that this is a sequel to are criticized for asking many questions without having an actual answers. References =